distinctly remember that for about one half-minute the whole vast
universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I
floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of
low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they
grew, if such visionary tiring could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled
in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of _having
one's feet unsupported_, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed
to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in
that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when
lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but
the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of
the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power
of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted?
It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite
cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament,
but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition
in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure
opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and
everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight
glimpse of the same sensation, and then too, strangely enough, while
swimming,--in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared
plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild
poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive
sensation which drowning men are said to have, that spasmodic passing in
review of one's whole personal history. I had no well-defined anxiety,
felt no fear, was moved to no prayer, did not give a thought to home or
friends; only it swept over me, as with a sudden tempest, that, if I
meant to get back to my own camp, I must keep my wits about me. I must
not dwell on any other alternative, any more than a boy who climbs a
precipice must look down. Imagination had no business here. That way